Wanted: candidates for BBC personality of the year award

Chris Chataway was the first. Andrew Flintoff was the last. And the angler Bob Nudd was a winner, too, but, according to an enduring urban myth, was denied the honour by the establishment. It is our annual fascination: who will be the BBC Sports Personality of the Year?

This year it is different. With half the summer gone, there is not a soul at the corporation who has a clue who voters will go for as the fifty-second winner of their precious statuette. What is usually an orgy of self-congratulation dressed up in utter tweedom, with a list of strong contenders emerging by this stage, could turn out to be the sporting disaster of the year.

Even old hacks cannot remember a poorer crop of candidates. Cricket? No. Football? Move on. Rugby? Not this year. Athletics? No way. Tennis? You cannot be serious. Golf? If Colin Montgomerie performs a miracle on The Wirral this week. Boxing? Joe Calzaghe, if voters watch ITV and the BBC can embrace a prizefighter who earns his money with a rival; don't count on it.

You have to go back, possibly, to 1971 - when Princess Anne won it, absurdly, for winning the individual European three-day event title at Burghley - to pore over a field of such staggering mediocrity.

Even the grovelling notes that accompany her entry in the corporation's archive concede that the Princess 'enjoyed moderate success over the decade and was part of the British equestrian team at the 1976 Olympics'. Well break out the Pimm's.

There was also the 17-year-old Scottish swimmer Ian Black in 1958. As good as he was at the start - three European titles and an Empire Games gold medal - he never touched those heights again. He came back from the 1960 Olympics potless and retired to coach in Canada.

Partly, the lack of options this year is of the BBC's own making, although they would find that difficult to accept. Down the years their viewers have fed what they perceive to be the BBC's taste for safe, if entirely worthy, winners. And you could have no argument with many of them: Paula Radcliffe, runner; Steve Redgrave, rower; Jonathan Edwards, Christian and triple-jumper; Torvill and Dean, ice-dancers; Robin Cousins and John Curry, figure-skaters; Virginia Wade, the voice of the silver-jubilee year.

And so it goes. Precious few rebels. Nothing to frighten the horses. A couple have slipped through, though. Paul Gascoigne, although he had yet to lose it in a major way when he won it in 1990; Daley Thompson, who was undeniable in 1982. Others have been less lucky, in this and other quarters.

There are a few lingering injustices in British sport that refuse to leave the consciousness: the Queen continuing to deny Jimmy Greaves a gong for his part in the 1966 World Cup, more than likely because he is a recovering alcoholic; and the failure of two great working-class heroes to be crowned the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, four-times world fishing champion Nudd and the darter Phil Taylor, who has no peer in his sport.

No British sportsman has dominated darts so completely as The Power, yet any support for him through the voting coupons of the Radio Times consistently fails to register. Dark suggestions that his image does not please the BBC (even though he has been recognised by Buckingham Palace) are always dismissed, never convincingly. Yet there is an argument that darts is one of the purest sports, wholly uncomplicated with a patently obvious, unriggable result plain for all to see.

You can still pick up the odd lively debate about Nudd missing out in 1991 on the website Worm Drowners Forum. It was the one that got away. Taylor, meanwhile, can throw his arrows until he is 20 stone and he won't get a sniff.

Otherwise, it could be Calzaghe (who already has an MBE), although injury prevented his building on his awesome achievement of whipping the loud American Jeff Lacy in March. It was one of the most consummate boxing performances in Britain in a long time. Had the likeable Welshman been able to defend his title in Cardiff last weekend, he might have sealed it - even appearing on ITV.

This time last year, of course, there were a whole team of possibles lining up. They all wore white and they would go on to take part in what Richie Benaud described as the best Ashes series he had seen. There were heroes from one to 11 in the England cricket team. Not so many now. If they retain the Ashes this winter, they will be back in contention, but they have had a fairly ordinary time of it since sending Ricky Ponting's men home so chastened last September.

In the absence of anyone else, perhaps the young Essex and England batsman Alastair Cook, a centurion at Lord's and averaging more than 50, is a hope. His image fits.

Could there be a left-field late runner? When David Steele won it in 1975 for taking on Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee at their most fearsome, it was for grit rather than shining class. At Lord's, alongside the smooth quality and youth of Cook, there was another candidate, an unfashionable batsman who has had to graft to gain a regular place in the side.

Paul Collingwood is England's most improved batsman over the past two seasons, although he has always been a very good player. His consistency is his strength. He doesn't fail often. What he has done against Pakistan at Lord's is post a big score on a big stage. If he can do it again once or twice this summer, Collingwood could be on the BBC podium at the end of the year.

What's luck got to do with it?

This World Cup was notable for the number of very clever managers. And Sven-Goran Eriksson. But it seems he never had a chance, poor man. A study coming out of Cambridge University concludes: 'Reputation is not determined significantly by the manager's talent, effort or decision-making skills, but mostly by pure luck.'

The reasoning goes that the longer you stay in a job, the more likely you are to fail. Dame Fortune, that every-lying jade, will get you in the end. If you're unlucky enough to be in charge of a team that loses because your striker is crocked or sent off, your reputation suffers and you are, eventually, for the high jump.

'The study identified that talent, effort and ability play little part in explaining whether or not a manager remains in office,' says a release that accompanies the study. 'Even the best-chosen players can damage a cruciate ligament in the first minute of the match by complete chance.' With all due respect to the esteemed academics, I don't think so.

They would ask us to believe that taking Theo Walcott to Germany, posting Wayne Rooney a mile away from his mates and staying with a captain whose legs grew more leaden by the day had nothing to do with England performing poorly. Eriksson wasn't solely culpable, but he played a part.

Luck is a convenient get-out clause. But to blame your own shortcomings or lack of success on what you perceive to be a random collision of independent circumstances over which you have no control is to dismiss talent and the determination to overcome setbacks. It is to give up. If you believe in luck, good or bad, why bother getting out of bed? Why bother going to the World Cup?